"You are not making the mind's case any brighter, Bill, by putting it that way. Yes, the mind, the glorious human mind destroyed them and turned forthwith to grovel in the dust before monsters like this one before us--before Prejudice, Ignorance, Superstition and Worse." "What a horrible piece of work, then, is man!" "Take the average of the human mind," went on Milton Rhodes, "not the exceptions and those so brilliant and so wonderful, but the average of all the human minds in all the world today, from our Newtons--if we have any now--to your savage groveling in the dust before some fetish or idol made of mud; do that, and the skull of man is found to be just what I said--a dark and fearsome cavern, a habitat for bats and ghostly nameless things." "What a strange, a horrible idea!" I exclaimed. "The world is proud of its Newtons now," said Rhodes. "But was it proud of them when they came? Whenever I see a man going into ecstasy over the wonders and the beauties and the glories of the human mind--remember, Dante was driven from his country--then I think of these words, written by the Philosopher of Ferney: "When we reflect that Newton, Locke, Clarke, and Liebnitz, would have been persecuted in France, imprisoned at Rome, and burned at Lisbon, what are we to think of human reason?" "Alas, you poor, poor humans," said I, "you are only a breed of vile Yahoos!" "Oh, don't misunderstand me, Bill. The mind of man is a fearful thing, but it is wonderful too, as wonderful as it is dreadful; and the more wonderful, perhaps, than it intrinsically is because of the very grossness and the very sordidness that it has to conquer. We are prone, some of us, to think the record of the intellect a shabby one; but, after all, the record is not, all things considered, so bad as it may seem at a first glance to be. It might have been better, much better; but we should rejoice that it is not worse, much worse; that the mind, the hope of the world, has made even the slightest advance that it has. Man, however, is on his way at last. And, with Science on his right hand and Invention on his left, he can not fail to conquer the ape and the tiger, to win to a future brighter even than the most beautiful of our brightest dreams." "Well," said I, turning and seating myself on one of the steps, up which steps perhaps many victims had been dragged to sacrifice, "this is a fine time truly and a fine place indeed in which to discuss man and the glorious destiny that may await him, in view of the fact that some spot in these cursed caverns may soon be our tomb. "And," I added, "there come the Dromans."